Credits. I find Maria's eyebrows just plain unsettling. They seem to look at me and say, "Nerk, nerk! Submit, human!" And, you know, I've never really noticed it, but these credits end with a [BOMP], too.
Twinkly music brings us back to the Aspiring Corporate Weasel Death Watch, where Raj and his salmon-colored blazer (!) and pale blue shirt (?) (feel free to switch those pieces of punctuation; they work either way, according to the commutative property of quizzical fashion) are asking how the Boardroom situation went. Oh, and wait, it turns out that Raj has finished off the outfit with boxers, so...now he's badly dressed and, apparently, taking fashion cues from crazy old perverts. Maria and her giant lapel flower, Audrey III, tell Raj that there was "active conversation" (a concept she feels compelled to demonstrate with "talky-talky" hand signals) between Wes and Andy in the Boardroom. Chris asks who she thinks will take a walk, and she says she suspects that it will be Andy. In a bedroom, Maria confides to us in the sad voice she saves for funerals and golf play-by-play that indeed, Andy's safe return from the Boardroom would leave her "incredibly surprised." Considering how waxy her face already is, I don't know I could even tell if she were surprised, but whatever. The rest of the Boardroom returnees are asked whether everyone picked Andy to go, and they all report that they did. Which isn't true, because Maria seemed to blame Wes, but there you have it. If honesty were class, these people would be edible underwear.
Andy and Wes come through the front door as the conversation around the dinner table continues. When Andy steps into the kitchen first, there is a cry of "Whoooa, Nellie," because we have momentarily stepped into a Dan Rather election-night rant. Andy pauses for a minute, relishing the moment, quite understandably. Then, he brings Wes in behind him. "Shit," Kelly says with some surprise. Maria reports that she was "completely blown away." (Maria's Eyebrows: "Nerk, nerk, we bring greetings from the Zobjar Galaxy.") She calls Andy's return "a great example of the fact that you just never know what's going to happen when you get into the Boardroom." No one seems to talk to Andy, really, and as Wes comments on how warm it is in the suite, Andy wanders off. As we watch him pace on the balcony, Andy voices over that he felt like the kid in dodgeball who didn't get picked for the team. That's okay, Andy -- that kid is usually the only person at the high school reunion anyone wants to talk to. In an interview in which he is apparently trying to look as baby-faced as he possibly can -- complete with backwards baseball cap -- Andy says that his youth is a fact, and that he came to win, so he's going to start bringing out a different side of his personality, starting...tomorrow! Well, that's always the best time to start your assault on the universe. I've done a million times. In fact, I think I'll do it again. You know, tomorrow.
The morning, the phone rings, and a bleary-eyed Andy is the one to answer it. See? Assault on the universe! It's a whole new Andy! It's phone-answering Andy! Rhona reports that they have to wait by the TV in their suite, because at 8:00 AM, Trump will be calling them. Wow, how very Big Brother. Maybe America voted, and one of them gets to attend the VMAs or something. Maria pulls on a robe, and then a half-dressed Wes appears to be grooming Andy's collar in the mirror. Wow, that's a new direction in which to take the story. Prepare to have the Pet Shop Boys added to the soundtrack. Everyone heads out into the living room. We see the Trump plane, where Trump is in the middle of signing some papers for an undoubtedly yooge deal. Then, the Hair appears on the TV in the suite, talking directly to the camera. He welcomes the candidates to "week eight" of their experience, by which he means "the eighth three-day period playing the part of a week." He informs them that he's not there because he's on his plane, headed to Ecuador for the Miss Universe pageant. And who's meeting him there? Boyfriend Bill. As Trump points out, free girls are among the perks of working for him. If you aren't into girls, you can trade them in for extra dental benefits. It's all explained in the handbook. He reminds Jennifer of her exemption from last week's victory, about which she shifts with cool discomfort. Trump breaks the news that this week's task will once again involve noted horndog and dickweed Donny Deutsch, who was so much of a weasel last season with the women and the Marquis Jet ad. This week, Deutsch will be overseeing their work putting together advertising to recruit for the New York City Police Department. The team with the better campaign will win. Losers to the Boardroom. And then he signs off, and they all talk about what a good task it sounds like it's going to be.
The candidates, accompanied by George and Carolyn, head for Deutsch to find out more about the task. They storm past a lot of people who look up from their cubicles with great hatred, thinking, "If one of these fame whores leaves the coffee pot empty, I swear to GOD." We are then asked to believe that Deutsch gets a call telling him the candidates have arrived -- which came right when they had a tight shot of his office phone, too, what luck! -- and he goes off to meet them. He enters a large conference room, prominent nipples blazing, and pretends that he thinks the candidates look smart. He repeats that they're doing this NYPD recruitment campaign, and he wants them to go for "the emotional part." "The real core of this assignment," he says, "is hitting people here." And he puts his fist right between the nipples of steel. You'll notice he did not gesture toward his balls, Maria. And Kelly. But I'm jumping ahead. He tells them not to screw up, and leaves.
Andy tells us that his name was drawn to lead, and he's happy for the opportunity to step up. Or, you know, whatever. Look at me with the sports metaphors. I'm talking like them now. Terrifying. Anyway, Andy holds a meeting where he talks about the need for the campaign to be "honest" and "heartfelt." He interviews that he thinks the campaign needs to make people want to join the force, but also "asks bigger questions." Andy suggests to his team, "When's the last time you saved a life?", and says they should use something like that. Maria, talking to him like he's four years old, says, "Okay, help us -- help us see it." He just gave the tagline, nimrod -- what do you need, flash cards? Andy obligingly continues explaining the emotion that he's going for, and Maria is pointing at him and cutting him off, and saying, "We gotcha," when she totally doesn't, as she will later demonstrate. She interviews that Andy is "slowing [them] down to a certain degree" because he's talking about the emotional heft. "We already know that," she interviews with a tone of insufferable condescension that fits perfectly with her sighing remark about how difficult it's been keeping the team on track. Her eyebrows? Oh, they're still plotting against us all. Nerk, nerk.
Maria goes on to prove what an unmitigated moron she really is by insisting that heart is all well and good (you might think it's a little better than that, even, what with the way it's what they were specifically told to concentrate on), but she's thinking...Hummer! "Let's talk about sex appeal," she says, as if everyone in the room has been neutered except for her, and she's just trying to bring the libidos back to life. Of course, not only is Maria's approach entirely wrong, but Maria's approach is totally offensive. Do you suppose she's wondered whether an organization that is three years removed from watching a bunch of guys die would want you to promote joining up because it's going to make you look hot? Do you suppose she wondered whether existing cops would want to be standing to guys who are there because they thought Hummers were sexy? Of all the clueless, brainless, tin-eared nonsense we've been put through on this show -- and there has been quite a lot of it -- I'm not sure I've ever seen anything to quite equal this. Andy, to his credit, disagrees with her. Maria drinks from her little coffee cup as she interviews that she is so brilliant at marketing that she could easily have taken over and done the task wonderfully, but little Andy was just so determined to be a leader that he wouldn't allow anyone to take it away from spunky little self. Well, how young of him. If only he had Maria's sophistication and a devouring lapel decoration.
Floyd Bennett Field, NYPD Training Facility. Apex is just arriving. Raj interviews that the facility offered them an impressive collection of doodads and weaponry and vehicles that they could use in their shoots. He can almost feel the killing. This is where we learn that Elizabeth was chosen at random to be the Apex project manager. She tells us that the task is "do or die," because the first time she led, she lost. And she narrowly escaped, too, and like Maria, she owes much to the fact that that was the week the team decided to railroad Stacie. "I need to come through with a win on this task," she says. Her team sits around a table. Chris rattles off some stuff about how the NYPD has always had great technology, and 9/11 changed the world, and now, "You don't have to be on the other side of the globe to be on the front line." Elizabeth interviews that she wasn't comfortable going with a highly military theme, and that she really thought they needed to focus on more emotional themes -- so far, so good, since that was the assignment and everything. Elizabeth tells Chris that she likes the idea of times changing, but she's not getting the sense she thinks they need of balancing the extraordinary things cops do with the not-extraordinary things. Which is right on, to my eye, but her entire team is rolling its eyes anyway. Kevin snorts with a condescending smile as she's talking, kicking off the week in which I learn not to like him either.
In an interview, Kevin claims that Elizabeth would first name something she liked about a concept, and then something she didn't like. Which, in and of itself, doesn't seem entirely wrong to me. I like my leaders to see things in more than one dimension. It's why I'm voting. What we do see is Elizabeth consistently saying that she doesn't like the idea of making it all about the terrorism/world events angle, when much of police work is so much closer to home. Raj lectures to Elizabeth that any concerns she has about being too militaristic are "unfounded." He just flat-out says it. Doesn't raise it as an issue, doesn't allow for discussion. Lectures her that her concerns are unfounded. And then Chris has to throw in, "It's not a friggin' tampon commercial." Right. Because when girls don't go for your over-the-top Rambo bullshit, you should remind them that to object is to just remind everyone that all they know about is girly stuff. Like tampons. That shit is so infuriating. Working for giiiiiirls! They want to make everything into a taaaampon commercial! That jackass. I should have known he'd never stay as cool as he was when he hated the public.
Anyway, Elizabeth says that there is such a thing as "too negative," and Raj shrieks at her -- literally shrieks -- that she's wrong, and insists that trying to motivate people through stark terror is not either too negative. Elizabeth ultimately tells the team that if the rest of the group feels strongly about a military sort of theme, she will go with it, and she then interviews that she was stuck in a situation where she was alone on her side of the issue, and her entire team was on the other side. She says she felt like all she could do was take the concept her team wanted to go with and try to make the best of it. Which is, in my opinion, the first place where she went wrong. She was right about the Scare The Pants Off Of New York concept sucking, and I think she knew she was right, which is why she kept resisting. But instead of telling them, "We're not doing a terrorism-themed ad, so come up with some other ideas," she withered, took the team's idea, and then tried to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And she's not very good at purse-making in the first place, and she doesn't know what to suggest instead, which is what makes this entire thing a nightmare of mismanagement. She should have told them, "I am the project manager; we are not doing a terrorism-themed ad; come up with something else." Because the worst that could happen is that they could fail and she'd be blamed. In this situation, she knows they'll fail, because they're obviously not doing the assignment as it was given, and she's trying to half-ass the whole thing, and she's still going to be blamed. One thing good leaders do is keep everybody else from following every dumb-ass idea that comes up. Again? This is why I'm voting.
Elizabeth runs into another problem when she tells the team that they're going to have to go and shoot the footage they're going to use before they know exactly what they're doing, because the shooting will take far too long to wait for a script. Kevin says he disagrees, but she says she knows it's going to take a long time. Kevin smirks condescendingly at her. He then interviews that they had limited time, so they had to just shoot as well as they could and hope for the best. Back in the conference room, Jen applies lip gloss as Raj begins his hysterical comedy routine about terrorists. No, really. It's hilarious. He and Chris talk about how Raj could, in the commercial, run toward the compound shooting a gun in the air and wearing a body bomb, and then get shot by the cops. Wow. They are so in tune with the client, because I predict that the NYPD thinks the idea of a guy with a bomb strapped to him is completely hilarious. Whatever. I despise them all. Including Jen, who's smirking in that "I'm the girl who won't make the offensive joke, but I'll laugh at it so you think I'm cool" kind of way. Elizabeth, much to her credit, is legitimately disgusted, and says it was "the rudest thing [she] ever heard in [her] life." Raj does his "alalalalala" imitation of a crazed suicide bomber one more time, as Chris laughs hysterically. Elizabeth looks ill. It's ironic to me that the guys who probably would spend the most time lecturing you about how important it is to go out and kill terrorists are the ones who patently don't grasp the gravity.
Mosaic arrives at the training facility to find that Apex is already filming helicopters and whatnot. Wes says that it appeared at this point that Apex was way ahead of them. Over "Ride of the Valkyries," we watch Apex's helicopter -- which it is having such a fine old time filming -- as it rises into the sky. The camera guy follows the helicopter, and as Apex fucks around having a good time playing like it's a videogame, they film a guy dropping from the helicopter to the ground. Which...looks exactly like a guy dropping from a helicopter into a practice field. The scene has "Non-Emergency Situation; This Is Only A Drill" written all over it. Raj, however, declares it "neat." Which I think sums up about where Raj's brain is on this task: "Helicopters are neat; therefore, we should have an ad with a lot of helicopters." Hey, it's the way my six-year-old nephew would do it.
Later, Andy is trying to get shots for the Mosaic commercial. Unfortunately, it's looking like it's going to rain. Andy explains that he had a specific list of shots he wanted, and the weather was on the way. Andy directs a shot of a bunch of cops breaking down a door -- shot nice and tight, so you can't tell where they are. In his interview, just as we watch him trying to cram in the shots he needs, Andy tells us that he didn't come to be weak; he came to win, and he pushed every timeline in order to make that happen. Andy grabs a shot of a cop saying, "It's your life; what's ? Join the force today." Which I think is a great line, not that the cop is a great actor. Because...not exactly doing King Lear at the local dinner theater, if you know what I'm saying.
Trump's overly portentous motto this week is "You Have To Love It." As we watch...the Miss Universe pageant...sigh...Trump says that in order to represent him and his organization, you have to be driven, blah dee blah, and love what you're doing. As Trump watches a Miss Universe pageant, he does a little chair-dance quite reminiscent of his groundbreaking Chicken Shack work on Saturday Night Live. I swear, he is the biggest dweeb in the history of ever. Some woman has her arched back tended to (huh?) as Trump explains that these excited, love-having people are the marvelous ones who do great things, or something. Is that Daisy Fuentes kissing Boyfriend Bill? Hmph.
Apex. Kevin explains that after they shot the footage, he went back to the office with Elizabeth to work, while the rest of the slackers went back to "get some rest for the day," meaning "eat, drink, and shit-talk Elizabeth." In the room where he and Elizabeth go to work, she says that she's being haunted by the idea that they're going about it the wrong way, and it's making it hard for her to work. ("Stifling [her] creativity," even, because Elizabeth only talks in clichés, as you may be noticing.) She says in an interview that ultimately, she wasn't willing to do a campaign she thought sucked, so she found herself having second thoughts. (It's not the second thoughts that will kill you, you know. It's the third, fourth, and especially fifth ones.) Kevin tells Elizabeth that if she's not happy with the campaign, she's not going to be able to hold the creative team responsible for how bad it is -- "it's going to be on [her]." He tells her that he's willing to stay and help her come up with something else that she's more comfortable with. She says yes, and says she'd appreciate the help.
Later, Kevin and Elizabeth are still working. He brings up the idea of contrasting a guy saying he's not excited about what he's currently doing with the footage of the helicopter guys and stuff. Elizabeth says she loves that idea. She interviews that the idea she and Kevin came up with was "about getting a hip, great job," rather than about keeping everyone in the city from dying in a sea of fire. "Scare tactics don't work," she says. "We cannot be about military." As she and Kevin leave, she tells him she knows she's going to make enemies when the rest of the team finds out she's changing it. "You still reserve the right to do whatever you need to do," Kevin says to her, neglecting to add the critical qualifier, "within reason," as he will later wish he had done. "I'm not going to change my mind," she says. "I was so not happy with the original."
The morning, everybody's up early, and Kevin says that he feels like he and Elizabeth "turned a corner" with the project, and he feels much more positive. "I think what we developed is good," he says, "and hopefully, the team will see it our way." What was interesting at this point was that I felt like Kevin was admitting that he hadn't been crazy about the terrorism-centered stuff that Raj and Chris had come up with either, and part of him was relieved that Elizabeth had, in her own watery way, gotten it changed. It all looked so promising at this point, didn't it?
The thing we see is Elizabeth, telling the team about the new concept. Ivana is making a bitchy face, and Raj is outright scowling. Nice thing you're doing with the hair, by the way, Raj. I'll come rub your head time I need to lubricate a hinge. In an interview, Chris complains about all the time they spent on the original piece, and how Elizabeth then decided to change it. Elizabeth tries to smooth things over with the team by admitting to Ivana that she blames herself, because she should have probably insisted on a different approach from the beginning, and Ivana launches -- you guessed it -- a personal attack. "I have a feeling if we went with the testimonials, you would have said that we should have gone this way." Which is, you'll notice, completely counterproductive at this point, and does absolutely nothing to advance the situation. Any of these people should have been able to see that the more they attacked Elizabeth, the more she couldn't deal. And certainly, it's on her to deal, but if they were being pragmatic and genuinely trying to win the task, they'd have backed off, at least until they could talk to Kevin, who they have every reason to believe is sane.
When Ivana and company start to pick on her, Elizabeth reaches the moment when she irretrievably blows it, by being -- as she has been before -- unable to rest comfortably with the fact that anyone dislikes anything she's done. She is such a preposterously obsessive pleaser that whenever people put her down, she completely lets it get to her and decides that she must be wrong. So in the single worst decision she'll make all week, Elizabeth concludes -- as she explains it in an interview -- that once again, she has to start over. No! You don't! You're the leader! Tell them they'll just have to live with it! Sigh. Basically, Elizabeth came very close to fixing what her team was doing wrong, and then she let these idiots talk her out of it, losing her one ally on the team in the process.
Meanwhile, Mosaic has a meeting in which Andy plays them the inspirational music he has chosen. He explains how the ad will say, "When was the last time you were fearless?", and then a SWAT team will bust down the door. Kelly and Maria and Sandy all leave, all eye-roll-y, and Maria actually winks condescendingly at Andy as she leaves the editing room. It is so obvious to me that Andy's concept -- leaving aside the question of execution -- is good that I don't understand how they can not get it. I knew from the minute he started explaining it that Andy was on the right track, at least given what Deutsch said he wanted, and I fail to understand how the rest of Mosaic failed to notice, unless they were determined to hate whatever he came up with, for the simple reason that he came up with it. Down the hall, Maria leads a back-room bitchfest, in which she explains that it's so stupid that there isn't more "sex appeal," since the target market is 18-35. Does she truly believe that 18-35-year-olds cannot be marketed to with anything but sex? She is an idiot. If the young demographic you're talking about couldn't be moved by anything above the waist, they wouldn't be very likely to risk their goddamn lives in public service, now would they? Good Lord.
As George pays a visit to Andy and Wes in the editing room, Maria makes a call on the speaker phone to tell Andy -- in front of George, as she probably knows -- that he should know he's taking out all the sex appeal, and he'd better put it back. Andy tells her that there's plenty to excite young people in the ad. He explains in an interview -- spot-on, yet again -- that people don't join the NYPD to get laid. They join the police force "out of a feeling of pride." And, not to put too fine a point on it, because it's a steady job with decent benefits. I mean, sure, there's the odd cop that joins to get laid, but I really don't think they so much want those people, and Maria is just suffering from one of the worst cases of Failure To Get It that I have ever seen. Andy, running short of patience and not fooled by Maria's crap, tells her that he's not filling the ad with guys "straddling a bike with their shirts off." Kelly, showing that he's not nearly the cool operator he seemed like he might be for a while, interviews in solidarity with Maria that there needs to be "more sex in this campaign." He says that Andy, if he doesn't listen and makes this "critical error," will find it raised in the Boardroom. Making me like him some more, Andy nails Maria's phone call -- in a conversation with Wes -- as exactly what it is, an "exit strategy" aimed at placing blame for a possible loss, when they should be trying to work. I'm working hard at putting out of my mind all the reasons I have disliked Andy in the past, because he's having a very good week.
Elizabeth meets with Apex. She breaks the news to Kevin that she loves what they came up with, but "now, it's not going to fit." I don't know what "fit" means in this context, except that she's gone wobbly, and I guess she can't just say that. He interviews that this was where he began to flip. He reminds us that he stayed late into the night to help her, and now she's changing her mind. And about that, he's entirely right, and he's entirely right to be frustrated. He tries, in the meeting with the team, to get her to finalize her decision, and she says that she's made a decision, and she's asking for help to "carry it out." She gets more frustrated, he gets more frustrated, they've both had about three hours of sleep, and it's a bad situation all around. In an interview, he says that "right now," meaning as of the interview, they're five hours from the presentation, though that doesn't seem to reflect anything close to what time they had this conversation, of course. The dossier says they presented at 6:00 PM, and Elizabeth seems to have made whatever changes she made first thing in the morning on the second day of a two-day task. So...I mean, it's not like she waited until five hours before they had to do it and threw out everything they had, which isn't to endorse Elizabeth's course of action here. "I think our project manager sucks, flat-out," Kevin says, with an unnecessarily spiteful little smile. Elizabeth leaves the meeting to do...something, and while she's gone, the team bitches about how bad she is. What's remarkable is that they're bitching about her, even though they don't agree on what she should have done and have, in fact, all been working at cross-purposes. Ivana and Raj and Chris, after all, are the ones who just badgered her into going back to something closer to their idea, so if they were that concerned about the time getting short, you'd think they would have held their tongues at that point, figuring that the most important thing was to get the work done. You'd think that Kevin, accordingly, might save a mite of his frustration for the jerks who browbeat her into abandoning the idea he felt so positive about this morning, but...no. It's only Elizabeth. Because that's what these people do. They pick someone, and then nothing is anyone's fault except that one person. That's what's been unsatisfying about this season, is that for the most part, the teams have come up with someone to pick on, and that person has usually been the one fired. And it's just not interesting. Not satisfying. It's not that Elizabeth doesn't deserve a beatdown here, but no one on this team showed much sense on this task, and for her to take every speck of the blame is a result of the same ganging-up crap that has marked almost every episode of the season. I mean, last season, it was really very rare for the entire team to sit around blaming one person for losing the task. They mostly worried about themselves. But these people? That is all they think about. From the minute this task started, Raj, Chris, Ivana, Jen, and Kevin had their eye on one thing: who could be blamed if it went bad. And they all picked Elizabeth, so here we are. And that's not even mentioning the irony of Ivana, who couldn't manage two ice-cream carts without losing one of them and oversaw a budget with a $5000 hole in it, griping about someone else's poor management skills.
Aaaanyway, Jen explains that the team had this sense that Elizabeth was ruining it for the rest of their awesome asses, so the team became resigned. Or something. When Elizabeth gets back, Kevin meets her at the door and takes her back out into the hallway. He tells her she keeps changing her mind, and she says that she isn't changing her mind -- she's keeping the theme they came up with, and she's trying to combine it with the ideas the rest of the team feels so strongly about. Kevin cuts her off. "Let me give you some advice," he tells her, pointing in her face. "You've got a coup on your hands because you can't make a decision." He lectures her about what a bad job she's doing, and he orders her to make a decision. "Kevin, I've made a decision," she says. She starts to tell him what the decision is, but he...cuts her off again. "Listen to me for a second," he says. And he tells her how everyone hates her, and she tells him she gets it. "Kevin, from my perspective," she starts, but he...cuts her off again. He demands to know whether "they" -- who appear to be the art people -- know what she's planning. "I talked to them only about the badge," she says. "That's the only one I talked to them about." He asks her whether all of her final plans are reflected in the print ads, and her answer -- which does, in fact, answer the question -- is, "The three things I asked you for, there's one missing, it's the technology one." And despite the fact that she is answering the question, Kevin continues to point in her face and talk to her like she's an idiot, and says, "Answer my freaking question." "No," she says, answering the question for the second time, "because the technology one isn't there." "Now you want a technology one," Kevin starts, and Elizabeth says, "I always wanted a technology one, Kevin," but he's not listening, of course, because this is a lecture, not a conversation, even if she's partially right and he's partially overreacting. So he moves directly to the last refuge of guys who just can't stand it when girls won't stop talking when they're told to stop talking, which is, "Shut up for a second." Yes, "Shut up for a second," in spite of the fact that he has been making demands of her -- "Do they know this," "Do they have that," "Answer my freaking question" -- and then cutting her off every time she opens her damn mouth to answer what he's asking. He tells her there will be no more "back and forth" -- she, apparently, is only allowed to nod obediently -- and that she's going to go and write down what's in the print ads and give it to him. Kevin proudly proclaims in an interview that he's "an in-your-face kind of guy," which is a very typical and time-honored version of that reality show contestant "I just have to speak my mind and be up-front" thing, which always means, "You can't call me out as a jackass if I declare it myself like I'm going through customs." And a jackass is just what he was.
I have really liked the way Kevin has handled other situations, and I did understand that he was frustrated, but that entire scene was totally absurd. He's not her dad, she doesn't have to take orders, she doesn't have to stop talking when he says so, and she doesn't have to agree with his characterization of what she's doing. When you demand that people explain things to you -- what they're doing about this or that -- you have to let them tell you, or you are, by definition, the asshole in the situation. And he is. She's a terrible leader on the task, and she's gotten a lot of things wrong, but he's the asshole in that conversation. He was just berating her and showing off, and there was no chance that what he just did was going to help the situation. What he should have done was tell the rest of the team while Elizabeth was gone that he was happy with what they came up with last night, and he didn't appreciate the rest of them giving her shit about it when he and she were working until 2:30 in the morning while they were sleeping, and that he backed her version and wanted to stick with that. Had he done that, they might -- might -- have done substantially better. Of course, that approach wouldn't have given him an opportunity to waggle his finger at her and boss her around, so there's that disadvantage. As he stomps away from her, he says, "You'll get no more input from me on this." I'm not sure she...asked for any more input, but thanks.
Over at Mosaic, Kelly is still feeling awfully put-upon because he has to tolerate Andy and how much he sucks. This time, he's upset that Andy, having come up with their concept, might actually want to pitch it. Either Sandy or Maria says that Andy needs to have some role in the presentation, first because he wants to, and second because he's a national debate champion, and she suspects that "this kid can talk." Kelly says, "Excellent points, both of them." And then, talking from behind his hand, all deadpan contempt, he says, "Except for the first one, because it doesn't matter if he wants it, and the second one, because this isn't a debate." God, what a raging prick. HATE! I don't know how I didn't get how much some of these people sucked ass until this week. You will be shocked -- shocked, I tell you! -- to hear that Kelly actually thinks that he is the best person to give the pitch. When Andy arrives at the meeting, Kelly brings up the issue of who's going to pitch, and Andy says he's going to do an introduction. Kelly smirks smugly. He gets up and says that the only time he ever heard Andy pitch, it was "debate-sounding." Whatever that means. Kelly claims that he has "actually done it," because apparently, being in the military and being a New York City police officer are exactly the same thing. Kelly answers Andy's opinion that there's not really sameness there by insisting that there is, and that it's "generally accepted." HA! Does anyone not know that anyone who has to explicitly tell you that his opinion is "generally accepted" has absolutely no argument? I'll tell you who does know it -- Andy, the national debate champion. Seriously. I think the kid sees right through that, because he immediately says, "Okay, I'm going to go ahead with the introduction." So, in other words, "Thanks for your input. Consider it rejected." He does give Kelly a role walking the guys through the media stuff, voicing over that he did this to "placate Kelly." As they try to divide up time, Andy says that he's going to do a minute or a minute and a half, and Maria's like, "So Kelly, you'll do..." "The rest!" he says emphatically. "The rest." Oh, another person with absolutely no idea how he's going to come off.
Skyline porn! Yay! I really needed that in this week of suckitude. Now, in an interesting development, when Elizabeth shows the team one of her print ads, "No More Input" guy Kevin, who just thinks she needed to make a decision and go with it, says, "I oppose this," all with his providing input and stuff. Imagine that. Raj then yells at her about how the ad she chose isn't part of their "general theme," and she calmly says, "It is," and he completely loses his shit, waving his arms at her and whisper-yelling, "It's not!" See, they can't have this both ways. It can't be her fault for failing to make a decision when every decision she makes, they sit there and yell at her about. You can wash your hands of the whole thing and say she needs to make the decisions, or you can participate, but you can't wash your hands of it and then kibitz, because that's bullshit. Carolyn, in an interview, faults Elizabeth for -- listen carefully -- "her inability to take over a leadership role," because this has led to "animosity and so much disorganization on the team." I roughly translate that to, at least in part, "She needed to yank on the leash and tell these people to heel a lot sooner." Which is exactly what I think. Elizabeth didn't need to make creative decisions sooner, so much as she needed to get over her need to please everyone and tell some of these asshats to step off. ["Or, as the lovely Wing Chun has put it, 'This is the part in the prison movie where the new fish needs to break a chair over someone's head.'" -- Sars] At any rate, the rest of the team checks out again and leaves Elizabeth to handle it herself -- again.
Trump's plane approaches. He lands, and then he is in his limo, on the phone, telling Rhona that he just got in from the Miss Universe pageant. (LTG: "That phone isn't connected to anything." Me: "Of course not.") He tells Rhona to connect him to the Deutsch-bag when he calls.
Apex heads in to present its campaign. Chris tells the ad guys that the cops they talked to "all had the same message: they are on the front line." He goes on about how you have to want to protect both the city and the country, blah bling blah. Elizabeth shows the first of the print ads, which shows the rappelling helicopter guy, with white lettering over it, saying, "You Don't Have to Be on the Other Side of the World to Be on the Front Line." It's not a terrible idea, but it's horrifically executed. The design looks horrendous, the letters are partially obscured by the picture -- no good. Very much no good. The ad says, "Fight Crime on New York's Front Line." It's a close shot of a cop's face, looking very menacing, in that he's shot from under the chin. Always a great angle, sure to inspire fear.
And then, the TV ad. It is indeed highly military in tone, with very scary music, columns of motorcycles...worst of all, this time, it says, "To be on the frontline," rather than "front line." Not only is that wrong, but it's inconsistent, because they did it right every other time. Ew. In other weird news, the last screen initially comes up as, "New York's Finest Looking." That's before it adds, "For New York's Finest." But the first part kinda sounds like wordplay from an ad for a strip show about cops. Which I think is not actually the idea. Deutsch makes some alarmed faces, but eventually tells them, "Good job," which he doesn't mean, and sends them on their way.
And here comes Mosaic. Andy introduces the pitch. "We are going to ask them a question: When was the last time? When was the last time that you protected the world's greatest city?" He says they believe the answers to these questions will be a call to join the NYPD. The first print ad is totally gorgeous, a low shot of a police helicopter, with lots of open sky above it. And as with some of the phallic ads last year, the credit for the visually arresting nature of that ad belongs to the photographer, not the team. The ad asks, "When was the last time you took a leap of faith?" The one, I like even better -- it's a black background and a badge, and it says, "When was the last time you showed your true colors?" Very clever. Cheesy, but clever. Kelly is pitching now, and says that the question is personal. But not as personal as porn, like he wanted. And now, their TV commercial. Granted, the music is unbelievably corny, and these cops are not actors. But the words -- "When was the last time you saved a life?" "When was the last time you fought terrorism?" "When was the last time you made your family proud?" "When was the last time you were fearless?" -- that's good stuff, and it comes a lot closer to the reasons the NYPD wants people to join than the whole "join now, because otherwise, we're all dead" thing that Raj wanted to do. Or, you know, "Join now; chicks dig sirens." Deutsch likes it, you can tell, and he sends them out. When the teams are gone, Deutsch and his folks talk. They all think the Apex commercial is entirely too scary, and will actually turn people off. And -- what do you know? -- it lacks the emotion that they were asked to make part of the campaign. One of the women seems to acknowledge that the production on neither ad is what you would want to see, but Mosaic's has promise, if you did it right.
The teams are brought back in, and Deutsch gets Trump on the phone. And calls him "Big Guy," which...just, no. Trump asks how the teams did, and basically Deutsch tells him that Apex made New York look like "a police state." "You can't do an effective recruiting campaign and at the same time freak 12 million New Yorkers out." Heh. He then turns to Mosaic and says that they followed the task, and were very effective without being scary. Not even close, Deutsch says -- Mosaic by a landslide. Elizabeth looks ill. Trump tells Mosaic that they will be picked up at 9:00 AM tomorrow for their surprise reward. And oh, losers? One of you will be fired.
The morning, Mosaic takes the Trump limo out as Andy crows in an interview that the rest of these fools now know that they were led to victory by the kid they all wrote off. Which is a moment he's basically entitled to, considering how they treated him. The team gets out of the limo in Times Square. And when they look up at the big...whatever, Jumbotron...they see that their commercial is running. And it never will again, because it really is not professional-looking, but good for them anyway. Maria, of course, takes full credit for the entire thing, and for how rewarding it was to see her work -- by which she means Andy's work about which she fought him every step of the way -- up there on the big screen. I think she still wishes it had more tight asses.
Wes and Elizabeth talk back at the suite later. He tells her to "curse as much as possible" in the Boardroom. Heh. He also tells her that her best shot is to be opinionated and strong, and to hope her opinion is the same as Trump's. It's actually spot-on advice, which kind of surprises me, since it's...you know, Wes. As Elizabeth works on the computer, she says she fully expects to have the finger pointed at her in the Boardroom. And then Jen -- determined to keep up the trend of everyone I once liked totally sucking ass -- actually pulls Wes aside and lectures him about how he shouldn't have given Elizabeth any Boardroom advice. Excuse me? What fucking business is it of hers? He can talk to whomever he wants, you buttinsky! For crying out loud, what has come over the formerly sane? "It's not fair," she whines. Wes insists that all he told Elizabeth was, "Don't be a pussy." And that was on the air! Unlike "JAPs," which was censored in my time zone. Oh, what a world.
Raj and Elizabeth talk on the balcony. She says that it would have been more helpful if people had offered to help, rather than just endlessly complaining and ultimately walking off the job. She tells him that what they saw as waffling was her effort to get them off the military approach -- which, you'll remember, Deutsch absolutely despised. Raj snots to her that she'll probably pin that whole thing on him, what with it being...his idea and everything. Raj interviews that he expects to "come under fire" for having "supported" -- no, shoved, dear -- the terrorism angle for the ad. "Look," he says, "at the end of the day, if everybody had thought that was such a bad idea, we wouldn't have gone forward with it." Dude. At least in Elizabeth's case, she told you about a zillion times it was a bad idea. You refused to hear the reasons. You can't share the blame with everyone when you berated them for disagreeing with you about it. I tell you, it's a world gone mad. It's like nobody remembers anything they did even, like, earlier the same day.
Apex visits the Boardroom, dragging suitcases behind them. When Trump gets into the room, he asks Elizabeth what went wrong. She says that they didn't have a good idea before they had to start shooting. Trump asks her if that's her fault, and she says it's the whole team's fault, really. Trump asks her if she thinks she was a good leader, and she says she thinks a good leader is a person who "stands by their convictions." She says that she chose not to go forward with "a generic campaign [she] didn't believe in," and she doesn't do that. She says that she "swung for the fences," borrowing shamelessly from Deutsch's speech to the teams last year about how he likes to see campaigns done. Unfortunately, her campaign was far, far too wishy-washy for that argument. Nice try, though. Heh. Trump pumps up the pain by screening the ad in the Boardroom, which...yeah, it still blows. "It's pretty bad," Carolyn says. Another bad Trump voice-over (can we do anything about that? Is it possible at all?) says, "Wow, based on that, I feel I live in a police state." He then makes a dumb-ass comment about how this will keep the wives from telling their husbands to join. Trump asks if it was really Raj who wanted this approach, and if he "shoved it down [Elizabeth's] throat." Raj jumps in, saying that he advocating going full-on with whatever they did, and Trump says, in a quote I suspect of being lifted from elsewhere, "I love what you're saying, because if you believe that, you should say it." Raj goes on to say that his idea was the only idea available, and that was the reason he advocated it. Which is bullshit, because when Elizabeth expressed reservations about it and wanted to keep talking, he told her all about how unfounded her concerns were. He never said, "We don't have anything better." He said, "Any concerns you have about my idea are wrong." So this is bullshit.
And then Jen, setting a record for zero-to-hate in one week, jumps in about how Raj did a great job with the task, and "actually took a position," and blah dee blah. Of course, the bad blood between her and Elizabeth goes back some weeks, so there you go. Chris jumps in as well, arguing that this was the only direction available. He leaves out the part where he said the thing about the tampon commercial. Ivana, parroting someone else as she does every single week, says that she would "commend Raj for actually taking a position." "Is she weak and ineffective, or is she just weak?" Trump asks. I don't even understand that question. Is there "weak but effective"? Is that a choice? Ivana says that Elizabeth was both weak and ineffective. Wow, surprising. Jennifer, asked for her opinion, just parrots what Trump just said, calling Elizabeth "weak and ineffective" (original!), as well as indecisive and some other stuff. "Other than that, you thought she was great," Trump says sarcastically. "Other than that, I thought she was terrible," Jen says, totally unnecessarily, because obviously, Trump got it. Now, she's just being a bitch. Trump asks Elizabeth why everybody else seems to think she's incompetent. Elizabeth tries to answer, but he just turns back to Jen to ask her if she would say "incompetent." Eventually, Jen says yes. When Elizabeth points out that she tried to come up with something better, Kevin jumps in to tell the story of helping her come up with something better, and her changing her mind again. The Trump VO returns as he lectures Elizabeth about not letting her team change her mind for her in the middle of a task. Trump then says how everyone thinks she was so bad, and she -- correctly -- says that obviously, that's what they're going to say, because every one of them backed what turned out to be a terrible idea. "What the hell's missing with you, Elizabeth?" Trump asks her.
Wait, I think I know this one: Confidence. And that's the difference between Elizabeth and Andy in this task. They were both right, and they both led teams that were wrong. Not just slightly wrong, but egregiously wrong. Had Andy let his team do a sex ad, it would have been just as gross as the police state ad. The difference was that they both reached a point where they had to be prepared to gamble that they were right. That's what Andy did -- he gambled that he was right. If he'd been wrong, he knew that he would be screwed. But he was sure he was right, so he went with what he thought was right. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is so fundamentally lacking in confidence in some way that even when she's right and she knows she's right, she can't stand to say no to everybody else. It's basically the willingness to bet on yourself. And if you aren't willing to bet on yourself, you're completely screwed. Elizabeth choked when she was put in the position of gambling that she was right, and as much as the rest of her team did indeed undermine her and bat her around in a way that doesn't speak well of them, she still deserved her firing. There is no way you can lead people if they know they can browbeat you into changing your mind, because you ultimately are scared to bet that you're right and everybody else is wrong. Even if she couldn't come up with anything herself, if she had just been confident enough to say, "No, the terrorism ads are not in keeping with the assignment; I expect you to come up with something that is," it would have been better than what she did.
Now, Trump asks Elizabeth who she would bring to the final table, and she says Raj and Chris. Trump stares at her for a minute, and then he says, "Honestly, Elizabeth, I just don't think it's necessary. You're fired." She looks a little taken aback at the sudden change in the rules without any notice. "I don't want to waste a lot of time," Trump says. He throws everybody out. They all get on the up elevator, except for Elizabeth, who gets on the down. When they're all gone, Trump tells George and Carolyn that it was a "no-brainer," and he just didn't want to waste time.
Unsurprisingly, in her exit interview, Elizabeth feels like it wasn't fair, people ganged up on her, she stood by her principles, they were all mean to her, and so forth. So she's learned...nothing, and that's pretty much typical, so...well done, Elizabeth!
week: Stacie! Jenn C! Bradford! Um…Rob! Carolyn gets mad again. Demolition happens.